Irresponsible People

[Dracas]

This is just a quip..but I have to ask, as I watch the news.


How juvenile does this sound to you...

Three boys are going about their own business on either side of an endtable with a lamp on it, one on the right, two on the left. Somehow - the lamp gets knocked over and it falls down and breaks.

The first instinct of the two side of the table is to blame the other side of the table "You did it!" and from the other boys "No! You Did it!"

Slowly as mom look sinto the incident, it seems like the single boy on the right side of the table likely wasn't responsible, so the two boys that were on the left side of the table start blaming each other, "You did it!" and the other boy from the left side of the table says "No way! This isn't my fault! you did it!"


Honestly, how much does this sound like Canada and the US, and the US Democratic and Republican party right now, over who started the 'Great Blackout of 2003' ?

*chuckles* These are the people runnin the nation, you know folks, you can call me a tree-hugger if you like, though I'm not - and you can say all my ideals are wrong if thats what your opinion is, but look at this situation, who here can honestly say this entire thing isn't being handled like 'the great spilt milk of 2003' ?

Same Applies to Canada, though they didn't turn on themselves when 'the other country' was ruled out.

The US Did. Now THe Dem's be blamin' the Pubs' an the Pub's be blamin the bloomin Dem's.

I'm just a little stressed out by it. Is this the level of gross national maturity we have to live with?


:confused: :(

[herosrest]

This behaviour can be viewed as fallout of bi partisan politics.
The Romans were at it 2000 years back.
A not unsimilar system is in place in UK.

For a while now i've found it odd that a simple majority can win votes.
Modern Politics really requires a majority in favour - from each Party involved. There are too many Laws.

[comp_nut]

Same Applies to Canada, though they didn't turn on themselves when 'the other country' was ruled out.


please leave Canada out of this,our leaders our a bunch of idiots

[Dracas]

That was the point.

So touchy, I'm not like most people, I don't blame entire countries full of people for the actions of a few in charge, anyhow I have a great deal of friends up towards Calgary and Edmonton, so hah.

The point was though, that while both countries were acting childish, at least you Canadian folk's government didn't turn in on itself pointing the finger.

It just seemed pretty bum to me

[Billforce]

The electricity grid runs at a very precise level most of the time and the balance can be upset easily by unpredictable occurences such as lightning, failure of one generating station or even an unexpected overload by one portion. No one is actually to BLAME.
Finger pointing is AFTER the fact! It is impossible to anticipate every possible failure, if you did, you would have to have a 200% redundanct system and that expense would be astonomical.
This is just another WOOGLY WOOGLY wheel in the shopping cart of LIFE! Life goes on.

[DMohler]

Yes that is the state of American politics right now. Would'nt read too much into though.

[Dracas]

Well said Billforce, wouldn't be a thread without ya :t

It doesn't seem necessary to have the fingerpointing at all *because* of the fact incidence is unavoidable, seems people think they can control natural phenomenon, and while we've been very clever at making electricity work for us, its still a force of nature.

Blarg, nothing to say about it aside that. :rolleyes:

If everyone realises this (with the exception of our Government), life may go on, but its a disturbing state of affairs, least it is to me.

Bugger it all anywho. :(

</whine>

Nuff'a that I say :D

[mireland]

God FORBID we ever get inconvienenced(SIC) in life. Time to move on folks. speaking as an American, we are spoiled MOFO'S!


ranks right up there with people who live on a fault line and wonder why they get earthquakes..:rolleyes:

[Dracas]

Like me! :D

I don't look at Earthquakes as bad, I think of them as random Shiatzu massage's :p

[Yoshi]

Originally posted by Dracas
Like me! :D

I don't look at Earthquakes as bad, I think of them as random Shiatzu massage's :p

I think of earthqaukes as a foot message

[Someone Stupid]

The problem isn't with redundancy, we built that in, we just "forgot" to upgrade the rest of the infrastructure. Hell, manhattan itself has to generate some of it's own power during peak usage as it can't pull enough from the current lines without tripping them. Part of the system is still on edisons DC grid (a la Niagra Falls and parts of it's grid). The only time companies put up new lines is when they have to connect a new plant to the grid. In the upper northeast, as new york, quite a few good power plants have been shut down because enviromentalist wanted it so much they got it. They want to shut down a couple others as well. If those plants were up, the grid wouldn't have suffered total collaspe. Knowing a couple people who are in upper management positions in the energy field they find the stupidity of the US grid system amazing. Build in redundancy, then remove most of what is needed to keep the system up, not to mention keep up cable that's 50 years old, and some cables are upwards of 100 years old if buried, that means paper insulation, which means now, no insulation. Doesn't make it hard for them to just smaller breakers if a larger one fails to catch it, thus making it a much larger mess. Also there is no universal standard for breaker speeds for power lines. Some trip incredibly fast, others slow. Inspections are rare - hell, the chemical plant my dad worked at had 25 critical breakers (though it was a dual closed loop system, so if one went down, the other would still keep the plant up), but out of the 25 (all less than 30 years old - which is young for the grid - and some half where around 10 years "old" or so), they found 8 that were about to go out if there was a power problem thanks to them, not the power company investing in a thermal imaging camera (160,000 thousand at the time). They had to replace them at their cost, even though it was technically entergy's grid - they wouldn't replace them as they said they were within tolerances - not a single engineer at the plant agreed, and carbide ate the cost as if they didn't, orion would go down as well, so orion paid some as well (both chemical companies) - orion imaged their stuff using carbide's camera, found out they had to replace 30% of their breakers. That is just breakers... you still have old wiring with deteriated insultion, transformers which are no where near up to specs anymore and such. They had to replace a ton of **** to make sure they wouldn't go down, even with a dual closed loop system. Since energy companies have no incentive to upgrade the grid, they don't do it even when it truly is needed, and the northeast has one of the worst grids in the nation if not the worst due to the severe strain and lack of plants to make the redundancies built into the system work along with lack of simple maintanance - hell, they are researching ways to run more current on the old grid with superconductors as breakers... that doesn't solve the problem of the wires themselves just not being able to handle it after all these years, not to include the transformers at substations and even the transformers that finally step it down to the final current. All that will be affected by running hot as well, but they'd rather pocket the money than spend it.